1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of this invention relate generally to search industries and, more particularly, to special purpose machines, systems, methods and computer instructions for providing personalized search results.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet provides access to a great number of resources, including webpages, articles, files, and the like. To locate resources of interest from the vast number of resources available on the Internet, persons typically employ an Internet search or similar service. For example, a person may visit an Internet search website and submit a search query for “Arlington Texas” in hopes of locating webpages or other resources relating to Arlington, Tex. Search services typically display search results in a ranked listing based at least in part on their relevance to a search query. For example, in response to the search for “Arlington Texas”, the user may be provided with ranked listing of search results related to Arlington Tex. The displayed search result may include links to webpages, maps, etc. for businesses or other entities located in and around Arlington Tex.
Although such search techniques can provide users with a somewhat useful set of search results, the user may still have to search through the results to locate content that they are most interested in. For example, where a user is interested in the “Texas Ranger's Ballpark in Arlington”, but only knows that it is a landmark in Arlington, the user may submit the search query “Arlington” and may have to search through maps, webpages or the like related to Arlington to navigate to the content that relates to the “Texas Ranger's Ballpark in Arlington. The additional searching may include search query refinements, such as modifying the query from “Arlington” to “Texas Ranger's Ballpark in Arlington”, manipulating (e.g., zooming/panning)) within a displayed map to display the geographic region that includes the Texas Ranger's Ballpark, or the like. If a user repeats this process, they may have to engage the same refinements each time they conduct the search and, thus, a user may have to expend a substantial amount of time and effort to navigate from the search results to the content they are interested in.